Gonzi on Libya: moral principle prevailed over constitutional neutrality

Moral and ethical criteria had to prevail over the Maltese constitution’s prohibition to use the island as a staging post for covert missions that were launched to pull out foreign citizens from Libya during the 2011 conflict, former prime minister Lawrence Gonzi said in a speech delivered at Clare College, Cambridge on Malta’s role in the Libyan conflict.

Gonzi was explaining how the Libyan conflict had brought it with constitutional challenges in the way Malta was dealing with requests from foreign governments.

“We were inundated by requests coming in from governments all over the world requesting us to provide facilities for their military planes to use Malta as a staging post for them to carry out covert and overt missions to pull their citizens out of Libya and bring them to Malta from where they could be transported back to their home country using civilian transport.

“Strictly speaking the wording of our Constitution did not allow us to offer this facility. But we decided to go ahead. Again, the moral and ethical criteria – rather than the strict legal interpretation – were the ones that guided us in our decision.”

Gonzi also said that Malta’s neutrality was challenged by the need to take a principled stand from the very start of the crisis.

“Would we stand by the Libyan people in their hour of need – or would we choose to turn a blind eye because that was the most convenient thing to do in order to safeguard our people’s investments in Libya and the hundreds – if not thousands of jobs that depended on continued cooperation with the regime?”

He said commercial interests had been vital, with Maltese workers, investment and good neighbourly relations also being important. “Notwithstanding this, we were going to stand by the Libyan people, we were not going to remain silent, we were prepared to mediate if necessary but only if and when the violence stopped and respect for human rights was established.”

Gonzi was the last European leader to meet Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, a day before the 17 February 2011 ‘day of rage’, the protest that would spark off the Libyan revolution that toppled Gaddafi.

On 21 February, four days after the start of the uprising, Gonzi made his first public statement condemning the violence and making it clear that the Libyan people’s aspirations should be respected.

“I recall very clearly the tense discussions we held internally in those dramatic moments, fully realising that on the one hand a decision to keep the jets meant that we risked facing Gaddafi’s predictably vicious retaliation, whilst a decision to return the jets risked being interpreted as an act of betrayal by the Maltese government, a betrayal of the Libyan people and the Arab Spring movement itself,” Gonzi said, recalling the arrival of the two Libyan defector jet pilots who had been ordered to shoot at their own compatriots.

“By midnight of that same day I had made up my mind. We would not betray the Libyan people. We would not deliver to Gaddafi instruments of death which were already being used to murder innocent civilians who were striving for a better way of life. The jets were not returned.”